Smart people accept evolution
At Culture of Science there’s a little discussion about whether acceptance of evolution indicates intelligence. Looking at the GSS data there doesn’t seem to be a strong causal relationship when you control for other variables. But there is…
Evolution is a signal for real Republican populism
New York Magazine has a rundown of the attitudes of some of the G.O.P. candidates for the nomination in regards to evolution. Remember, this is an issue which is split down the middle in the American populace, but elites have a strong skew toward accep…
Evolution doesn’t fit our generalities
“Is Evolution Predictable?” asks a piece in Science. Here’s the first paragraph:
If one could rewind the history of life, would the same species appear with the same sets of traits? Many biologists have argued that evolution depends …
Non-zero sum transitions in the human past
A few people have pointed me to the recent paper in Science, Tenfold Population Increase in Western Europe at the Neandertal–to–Modern Human Transition. The basic result is obvious, and not totally revolutionary: anatomically modern humans may simp…
The end of evolutionary psychology
A new paper in PLoS Biology is rather like the last person to leave turning the light off. Evolutionary psychology as we understood it in the 1980s and 1990s is over. Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology:
None of the aforementi…
How did modern humans settle the world?
In lieu of lots of text, above is a stylized representation of the routes which Neo-Africans took ~50 thousand years ago from their point of departure to parts unknown. The two colors represent two models. The red lines show two major streams issuing …
Everything I didn’t know about sex
The Pith: The primary reason for the pervasiveness of sex among complex organisms is to maintain genomic integrity, not to increase genetic variation..
I just read a very strange article in the journal Evolution, Sex reduces genetic variation. In it th…
Is Chris Stringer a multi-regionalist?
In an interesting piece in The Guardian on possible proto-gorilla/proto-human hybridization, the journalist lobs this grenade:
But now that the once popular “single-origin model” of the evolution of Homo sapiens has been disproved, and the …
Tightening the interval of the expected
The Pith: The rarer the genetic variant, the more likely that variant is to be specific to a distinct population. Including information about the distribution of these genetic variants missed in current techniques can increase greatly the precision of …
Disease and human demographic history
There’s a write-up in The New York Times on a new paper to come out in PNAS soon on the relationship of disease variants to human demographic history over the past few hundred thousand years. I’ll probably review the paper when it comes ou…
We stand on the shoulders of cultural giants
In reading The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation in PNAS I couldn’t help but think back to a conversation I had with a few old friends in Evanston in 2003. They were graduate students in mathematics at Northwes…
Convergent evolution happens!
In the image to the left you see three human males. You can generate three pairings of these individuals. When comparing these pairs which would you presume are more closely related than the other pairs? Now let me give you some more information. The r…
Band of brothers at war
The fruits of human cooperation
The Pith: Human societies can solve the free rider problem, and generate social structure and complexity at a higher level than that of the band. That implies that much of human prehistory may have been characterized by…
Toward evolutionary monism
Is there any substantive difference between natural, sexual, and artificial selection? Or is it just semantic sugar, useful for humans in our own cognitive bookkeeping? I lean toward the latter proposition. To some extent I would think that this is an …
A map of charismatic canid genomic variation
The Pith: Wolves and coyotes exhibit geographic population structure. The red wolf may “only” be a coyote with a minor admixture of wolf, instead of a “real species.”
I like dogs. For various structural reasons I am not able to …
Saudi Arabia, where monkey became man?
As late as the 1980s it is reputed that prominent Saudi clerics were making the case for geocentrism. Of course presumably most Saudis are not geocentrists, but their religious establishment is so calcified that medieval science still retains some hold…
Nature vs. nurture, again, and again, and again….
In The New York Review of Books Richard Lewontin has a long review up of Evelyn Fox Keller‘s last work, The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture. Here’s the blurb from Duke University Press:
In this powerful critique, the esteemed h…
We, Robot & Hamilton’s Rule
The original robots
We are haunted by Hamilton. William D. Hamilton specifically, an evolutionary biologist who died before his time in 2000. We are haunted because debates about his ideas are still roiling the intellectual world over a decade after h…
One root for rice
The Pith: There was one rice domestication event somewhere in central China about 10,000 years ago. Probably!
Going by the numbers rice is the real staff of life. Rice is the staple for ~50% of humans alive today. So the science of rice is of major pr…
“Out of Africa” vs. “Multi-regionalism” revisited
A few months ago I exchanged some emails with Milford H. Wolpoff and Chris Stringer. These are the two figures who have loomed large in paleoanthropology and the origins of modernity human for a generation, and they were keen in making sure that their …